Many businesses are intolerant to the loss of service in computer equipment that provides services to their business or customers. One example is telephone switchboard service. Businesses may use telephony equipment to route calls for their employees as well as providing service for their clients. Loss of computerized telephony equipment can slow down or shut down business operations until a serviceman or other trained specialist can recover the computerized system to full operation. Service loss, even partial loss, could be the result of a hardware or software fault resulting in a disabled processor within the critical equipment. In systems with multiple processors, loss of a single processor can adversely affect the ability of the business to maintain service levels to their employees or customers. Often, manual equipment operator intervention is needed to recover those systems when a processor becomes disabled.
Prior art computer equipment can employ redundancy and have the capability to switch to a backup subsystem upon detection of an anomaly in equipment functions. But this redundancy switching can sometimes require manual intervention. Additionally, if redundancy is not available, then functionality may simply be lost or seriously degraded until the equipment is repaired or replaced.
Thus, there is a need for a mechanism in a multiprocessor computer systems to recover from a disabled processor without human intervention. The present invention addresses the aforementioned needs and solves them with additional advantages as expressed herein.